March 15-17, 2018
Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania

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Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speaker I

Professor Vincenzo Loia

Chair Professor, Department of Management and Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Italy

Biography

Professor Vincenzo Loia received B.S. degree in computer science from University of Salerno , Italy in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from University of Paris VI, France, in 1987 and 1989, respectively. From 1989 he is Faculty member at the University of Salerno where he teaches Safe Systems, Situational Awareness, IT Project & Service Management. His current position is as Chair and Professor of Computer Science at Department of Management and Innovation Systems. He is the coeditor-in-chief of Soft Computing and the editor-in-chief of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, both from Springer. He is an Associate Editor of various journals, including the IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics: Systems; IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems; IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics; IEEE Transactions on the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. His research interests include soft computing, agent technology for technologically complex environments Web intelligence, Situational Awareness He was principal investigator in a number of industrial R&D projects and in academic research projects. He is author of over 390 original research papers in international journals, book chapters, and in international conference proceedings. He hold in the last years several role in IEEE Society in particular for Computational Intelligence Society (Chair of Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, IEEE CIS European Representative, Vice-Chair of Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee).

Abstract

Situation Awareness is usually defined in terms of what information is important for a particular job or goal.
Most of the problems with Situation Awareness occur at the level “Perception” and “Comprehension” because of missing information, information overload, information perceived in a wrong way (e.g., noise) or also information not pertinent with respect to the specific goal. Thus, the current situation must be identified, in general, in uncertainty conditions and within complex and critical environments. In this case, it is needed an effective hybridization of the human component with the technological (automatic) component to succeed in tasks related to Situation Awareness.
Situation Awareness oriented systems have to organize information around goals and provide a proper level of abstraction of meaningful information. To answer these issues, we propose a Cognitive Architecture, for defining Situation Awareness oriented systems, that is defined by starting from the well known Endsley’s Model and integrating a set of Computational Intelligence techniques (e.g., Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and Formal Concept Analysis) to support the three main processes of the model (perception, comprehension and projection). One of these techniques is Granular Computing that makes information observable at different levels of granularity and approximation to allow humans to focus on specific details, overall picture or on any other level with respect to their specific goals, constraints, roles, characteristics and so on.
Furthermore, the proposed Cognitive Architecture considers some enabling technologies like multi-agents systems and semantic modelling to provide a solution to face the complexity and heterogeneity of the monitored environment and the capability to represent, in a machine-understandable way, procedural, factual and other kind of knowledge and all the memory facilities that could be required.

Keynote Speaker II

Professor Schahram Dustdar

Univ.Prof. Dr. and Head of the Distributed Systems Group, Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria

Biography

Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science and head of The Distributed Systems Group at the TU Wien, Austria. From 2004-2010 he was also Honorary Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands. From Dec 2016 until Jan 2017 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Sevilla, Spain and from January until June 2017 he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, USA. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, ACM Transactions on the Web, and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing and IEEE Computer. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Computing (Springer). Dustdar is recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award (2009), the IBM Faculty Award (2012), an elected member of the Academia Europaea: The Academy of Europe, and an IEEE Fellow (2016).
He received his M.Sc. (1990) and PhD. degrees (1992) in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik) from the University of Linz, Austria. In April 2003 he received his Habilitation degree (Venia Docendi) for his work on Process-aware Collaboration Systems - Architectures and Coordination Models for Virtual Teams. His work experience includes several years as the founding head of the Center for Informatics (ZID) at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz (1991-1999), Austrian project manager of the MICE EU-project (1993 - 97), and director of Coordination Technologies at the Design Transfer Center in Linz (1999 - 2000). While on sabbatical leave he was a post-doctoral research scholar (Erwin-Schrödinger scholarship) at the London School of Economics (Information Systems Department) (1993 and 1994), and a visiting research scientist at NTT Multimedia Communications Labs in Palo Alto, USA during 1998. From 2007 - 2009 he was Chair of the IFIP Working Group 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering and a founding member of the Scientific Academy of Service Technology.

Abstract

In this talk I will explore one of the most relevant challenges for a
decade to come: How to integrate the Internet of Things with software,
people, and processes, considering modern Cloud Computing and the
Internet of Things (IoT) with Big Data. I will present a fresh look at
this problem, and examine how to integrate people, software services,
and things with their data, into one novel resilient ecosystem, which
can be modeled, programmed, and deployed on a large scale in an elastic
way. This novel paradigm has major consequences on how we view, build,
design, and deploy ultra-large scale distributed systems and establishes
a novel foundation for an “architecure of value” driven Smart City.